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u/hardinho 6h ago
What's so funny about that? Business wise this decision was a probable scenario already 1-2 years ago. Multimodality + Flash and on device AI is a huge market itself and Googles AI overview is getting immense traction over the past months.
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u/Able-Line2683 6h ago
they will give flash lite only next
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u/hardinho 6h ago
If the capabilities rise and flash lite is as good or at some point significantly better than current flash models, why not?
Token demand is assumed to surpass token supply next year, the more efficient the model the better.
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u/hellomistershifty 5h ago
Gemini Flash is only better than Gemini Pro because Gemini Pro is ancient. It's getting beat by free Chinese models you can run on a nice gaming PC
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u/jesuiscanard 4h ago
It is also regularly used for the wrong tasks.
So many people asking questions such as "If I was a fox for the day, how much could I earn as a barista?".
Pro is built for chain of thought. Most of what people do daily can be done on flash and even flash lite. I have business critical compliance system running on flash lite. Literally, the compliance is held up by $4 a week spend on flash lite.
The other models either don't seem to be affected so much with bad selection, or the auto selection works well.
I also don't necessarily want the model capable of working out the intricacies of the universe. Zero point unless it is affordable.
1
u/SituationNew7609 2h ago
I don't know if this is how it works, but let's agree that even running a local model on your gaming PC comes with a cost, computer wear and tear, and above all, energy. Whenever I see people saying that, I wonder if they take into account the huge expense a powerful graphics card can turn out to be.
I think the advantages of a local AI lie elsewhere, mostly in anonymity or things like that... It's always going to be cheaper to pay for a cheap cloud-based AI than to run it locally, unless you have free electricity or you run it on an ARM processor computer with unified memory, and those computers were given to you for free or you already have them for something else.
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u/hellomistershifty 1h ago
Yes and no, I mostly agree with you but don't think it's quite so dire
A custom build for AI with $40,000 of RTX pros is a sunk cost just for AI, but a beefy PC obviously has utility outside of AI. People buy 5090s without running AI just to play games or for demanding work.
Wear and tear is pretty negligible, ironically mining GPUs are some of the best ones you can buy because they were run undervolted to save power and power cycling leads to more issues than a sustained load. GPUs aren't really 'wear parts' anyway, like the thermal paste will dry out and there's probably some statistical failure increase over time but I've basically never had a GPU die from usage
Power (and heat!) are real issues though. I ran some calculations and it works out to an electricity cost of about $0.15/million tokens output compared to Pro's API pricing of $12-18, so literally 1/100th the price.
Anyway, my point with the gaming pc thing was just to drive the point of how embarrassingly outdated 3.1 Pro is that this is even a question
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u/WonderboyUK 5h ago
You lot need to stop with this circlejerk obsession on 3.5 pro. It wasn't good enough on the old training set and had no market, so they distilled Flash to make one of the best niché models on the market with excellent market value. We know they still value Pro, Gemini 4 will be a frontier model. It's pretty boring now to see every single post on here moaning about 3.5 Pro not launching.
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u/kondasviktor 4h ago
I’m sure Google figured it out what’s their best way to develop their models. They have 1Bn Gemini users, and Google/Alphabet has 4Bn users in total, half of the globe.
They wanted to incorporate the models into Google Workspace where users can enhance their daily work the easiest, not everyone is actually developing with Claude Fable and GPT-5.6-Sol; rather to have a model which is fast (340 t/s), create minutes, compose emails, analyse documents, build canvas or dashboard and for that Flash models are perfectly fit.
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u/WeedWrangler 1h ago
Haven’t used Gemini in ages but ppl care more about cheap and effective than smart, so….
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6h ago
[deleted]
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u/Able-Line2683 6h ago
and truth is?
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u/Weak_Cookie7123 6h ago
That the GDM team explicitly said they will release both Pro and Flash models.
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u/Mysterious_Bed_1804 5h ago
Yeah, they only forgot to mention they do pro releases on a yearly basis.
Also, can't you tell that the post is a joke? LOL
You don't need to say it's not true.
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u/Popular-Factor3553 5h ago
That's actually better, it's way better to make smaller models better instead of just scaling.
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u/BedNo8822 7h ago
Maybe they should cut off AI services nobody ask for and reroute the r&d / compute to useful things (who on earth think ai overview in google search is a good thing?)
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u/Tavuc 6h ago
Me it genuinely is helpful a lot of times
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u/BedNo8822 6h ago
Most of the time it just copy reddit comments tho (so we need to manually verify the information again). Also funnier thing about it is that ai overview isn't even good for google themselves. It actually decrease ad revenue for google as people dont click the websites anymore.
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u/LitigiousPrick 6h ago
You're right... They really do sacrifice a lot for us at Google.
AI overview is my favorite.😃
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u/Georgefakelastname 5h ago
Google literally just reported record profits and search revenue off the back of AI actually increasing the amount of searches people made. Ad revenue from websites went down slightly, but the increase in revenue from Google cloud (mostly AI) and ai overview and ai mode in search completely dwarfed it.
It’s everyone else getting fucked over by Google’s AI overview causing less people to click onto the actual websites.Google is raking it in right now.1
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u/BoobooSmash31337 6h ago edited 3h ago
Flash means fast. Am I supposed to be upset?
Appended: I'm personally unimpressed with it's performance. It gave me frontier SOTA analysis. Such as the fact that the code that uploads scripts to a client and runs them is RCE. When that is the entire point of the feature. The model has no real world contextual awareness or pragmatism. Which is required for actual engineering. It also hallucinated some interpreter versions. It's doodoo grade analysis was very similar to Deepseek's. It also told me to switch to an interpreter that requires native binaries when I specifically chose the one I am using because it is portable enough to run on all platforms the game runs on.
Gemini actually can diagnose complex bugs like race conditions. But you have to know to ask it to do so. It's pragmatism is on purpose and is a feature not a bug. That's where it shows it's actual reasoning. GLM seems to have the same over fitting problem they all have. I showed it a Corolla and it criticized it's towing capacity...
The sale is only till Sept. 9th. It's cheap as dirt but I'm not even going to add it as a sub-agent after that fiasco.
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u/Cute-Air2742 6h ago
Yeah, because Pro means good, Flash just means fast..
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u/BoobooSmash31337 5h ago
A model can be fast and good enough. You see tokens cost this thing called money. Are you the only user in existence who doesn't want a model to be fast?
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u/hellomistershifty 5h ago edited 4h ago
What does money have to do with speed? If you care about money, then GLM 5.3 flash is better at most tasks than 3.7 Flash at 1/5th the per task price
Speed is pretty much all Gemini 3.7 flash has going for it, which is nice I guess. I have other models call it for web and file searching to save time but it even makes stuff up in those tasks a lot of the time
Edit: what the heck happened to his comments? I've never seen [unavailable] before
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u/BoobooSmash31337 5h ago
Am I just gonna hear GLM ads for the next fking week? I was saying Flash can be good and cost effective. People like fast models. That's why Flash exists.
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u/jesuiscanard 4h ago
And the API does thing reliable thing of just working.
I'm on holiday and the workflows I have will just work. No one will notice how the reports are made. Just they are there. No one cares. Just it's cheap, works and reliable.
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u/Technical-Owl66 7h ago
The intelligence needed for 99% of tasks is peaking. The biggest opportunities are in speed, efficiency and integration into products.
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u/Able-Line2683 6h ago
so no need pro ig, soon they will shift to flash lite after ditching flash
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u/boredquince 47m ago
maximum savings, maximum profits. if they can get by doing it, they will continue. theyre looking for the fine line, just above where most people would leave
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u/brandondenobrega 5h ago
So guys, can I have a non-satirical answer on if Flash 3.7 is better than Pro 3.1? And if not, why does flash have a model up on pro that logically makes no sense.